8 ms·

Eloquis: Early in the market and targeted the wrong customer segment

40 points by nicoserdeir 9y ago

boffinism 9y ago
I hadn't come across failory.com. Like autopsy.io - with multiple sites like this around, it seems like we rather like revel in failure...
- icebraining 9y ago
  I believe the father of them all is http://fuckedcompany.com/ http://fuckedcompany.com/ by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud Reading how others failed is a good way to avoid failing the same way. At least your failure will be original!
hbosch 9y ago
I don't know if there is a lot of useful information to glean from this post, but I did enjoy guessing about a few things that were (domain) name-related. Under "What would you do differently?" > I would definitely not put a lot of emphasis on domain name or invest a lot of money without researching the potential of the name. I was tickled by this, because at the outset I was actually interested in reading an article about the failure of a highly-marketed blood thinner of the (almost exact) same name. I guess this guy probably learned it's hard to win mindshare & SEO points when you're up against Pfizer, who owns Eliquis.com.
ravitation 9y ago
> Our brand name was a disaster and most of the traffic that we got, for free, was looking for an alternate name called “Eliquis” a drug from Bayer. There was no way we would win the SEO game. We had no SEO strategy or any other ecosystem strategy to piggyback our marketing on. First thought was definitely to the blood thinner... Which is an interesting commentary on the state of direct to consumer pharmaceutical marketing in the United States...
- roynal 9y ago
  Absolutely the blood thinner won and it's a hard lesson that we learned.
  - ravitation 9y ago
    My point was not so much about losing a battle over name recognition, that's something that happens relatively all the time. I mean specifically losing it, even to the general public that isn't on blood thinners (like myself), to a blood thinner. In a lot of developed countries, where direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising isn't legal this obviously would not have happened...
jchallis 9y ago
Not going to lie - first thought from headline was "how does a blood thinner target the wrong customer segment?? Have you ever been to a coumadin clinic?" And then I realized the issue.
- roynal 9y ago
  Yes, hard lessons and the funny thing is we were oblivious to that name and paid a lot to acquire the domain name.
lettergram 9y ago
Interesting, he recommends the book: > The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Achieve deep thinking and not arrive to simplistic explanation. When I first read that in 2013 it spurred my interest, which eventually lead to my current company: https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ The goal of which is to actually "identify" black swan events. The premise of a black swan is that you can't predict it, but I'd argue that quite often in a world of several billion people - someone has predicted it (typically those most in the know). Anyway, it's a good book and I've actually been using the system I built (https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/) recently to watch the decline in hype around cryptocurrencies. Which just goes to show, as the author notes - you can often be too early (or late) to the game and it makes all the difference.
notyourday 9y ago
If I may be so bold: TL; DR: "I spent 20k on writing code" Why? Because there's not a single sentence that I read addresses the most important question for any bootstrapped $THING: * why would anyone want to pay me for this $THING.
- roynal 9y ago
  You bring up a good question. The $ amount while painful was spent over getting some design work,domain name etc... The value we thought the product would add was to make apps more engaging. Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce world and I naturally translated that as a consequence to mobile app - I do realize that was a mistake. So yeah, we definitely expected to get paid for such a service.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce That's a claim that is not backed up by anything. Most personalized service one can get is in boutique non-ecommerce companies. Those companies are struggling. That in turn means that personalization at this time is a gospel.
devit 9y ago
After reading the article, I can't figure out what their product does at all in practice. Apparently it turns "hello user" into "Hello Bob, it’s great to meet you on a wonderful December day" but it's not at all clear how that's packaged into something that's useful and non-trivial. That seems like it could have been one of the main problems.
- roynal 9y ago
  Well, the example is a very simplistic one for the purpose of this interview. The vision, if you could call it that, was to package other signals e.g. weather, geography, and demography into personalizing a message. Having come from a background of e-commerce I definitely know personalization has a positive impact on cart values, engagement, and conversions. Considering all of that our hope was that we would be that kind of a personalization software for mobile apps.
  - devit 9y ago
    But how does that work in practice? Does their system determine those signals or are they fed to it as input? How can it possibly provide a generic solution to "personalizing a message" that works across all apps and is not just something trivial like the example in the interview? On the web the kinds of "personalization" I can think of are public account profiles, targeted advertisements, recommendation engines ("you may also like...", "products like this...", etc.), algorithmic newsfeeds and history-sensitive search. If their software does any of those, maybe they should just say what it does.
akanet 9y ago
To the interviewee: Having learned these lessons, why are you uh, making the "Product Hunt for Marketing Tools" next? Have you applied your learnings from the failure of Eloquis? This seems like an even harder segment to make money in.
- roynal 9y ago
  Yes the lessons learned here were translated. As of now the product hunt for marketing is a place for discovery and we realize that our new model will build a community and we have to build active monetization around value-based product around the same premise - yes product hunt for marketing won't make money by itself.

40 points by nicoserdeir 9y ago

I hadn't come across failory.com. Like autopsy.io - with multiple sites like this around, it seems like we rather like revel in failure...

icebraining 9y ago
I believe the father of them all is http://fuckedcompany.com/ http://fuckedcompany.com/ by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pud Reading how others failed is a good way to avoid failing the same way. At least your failure will be original!

hbosch 9y ago

I don't know if there is a lot of useful information to glean from this post, but I did enjoy guessing about a few things that were (domain) name-related. Under "What would you do differently?" > I would definitely not put a lot of emphasis on domain name or invest a lot of money without researching the potential of the name. I was tickled by this, because at the outset I was actually interested in reading an article about the failure of a highly-marketed blood thinner of the (almost exact) same name. I guess this guy probably learned it's hard to win mindshare & SEO points when you're up against Pfizer, who owns Eliquis.com.

ravitation 9y ago

> Our brand name was a disaster and most of the traffic that we got, for free, was looking for an alternate name called “Eliquis” a drug from Bayer. There was no way we would win the SEO game. We had no SEO strategy or any other ecosystem strategy to piggyback our marketing on. First thought was definitely to the blood thinner... Which is an interesting commentary on the state of direct to consumer pharmaceutical marketing in the United States...

roynal 9y ago
Absolutely the blood thinner won and it's a hard lesson that we learned.
- ravitation 9y ago
  My point was not so much about losing a battle over name recognition, that's something that happens relatively all the time. I mean specifically losing it, even to the general public that isn't on blood thinners (like myself), to a blood thinner. In a lot of developed countries, where direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising isn't legal this obviously would not have happened...

jchallis 9y ago

Not going to lie - first thought from headline was "how does a blood thinner target the wrong customer segment?? Have you ever been to a coumadin clinic?" And then I realized the issue.

roynal 9y ago
Yes, hard lessons and the funny thing is we were oblivious to that name and paid a lot to acquire the domain name.

lettergram 9y ago

Interesting, he recommends the book: > The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable: Achieve deep thinking and not arrive to simplistic explanation. When I first read that in 2013 it spurred my interest, which eventually lead to my current company: https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ The goal of which is to actually "identify" black swan events. The premise of a black swan is that you can't predict it, but I'd argue that quite often in a world of several billion people - someone has predicted it (typically those most in the know). Anyway, it's a good book and I've actually been using the system I built (https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/) recently to watch the decline in hype around cryptocurrencies. Which just goes to show, as the author notes - you can often be too early (or late) to the game and it makes all the difference.

notyourday 9y ago

If I may be so bold: TL; DR: "I spent 20k on writing code" Why? Because there's not a single sentence that I read addresses the most important question for any bootstrapped $THING: * why would anyone want to pay me for this $THING.

roynal 9y ago
You bring up a good question. The $ amount while painful was spent over getting some design work,domain name etc... The value we thought the product would add was to make apps more engaging. Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce world and I naturally translated that as a consequence to mobile app - I do realize that was a mistake. So yeah, we definitely expected to get paid for such a service.
- notyourday 9y ago
  > Personalization is a big deal in e-commerce That's a claim that is not backed up by anything. Most personalized service one can get is in boutique non-ecommerce companies. Those companies are struggling. That in turn means that personalization at this time is a gospel.

devit 9y ago

After reading the article, I can't figure out what their product does at all in practice. Apparently it turns "hello user" into "Hello Bob, it’s great to meet you on a wonderful December day" but it's not at all clear how that's packaged into something that's useful and non-trivial. That seems like it could have been one of the main problems.

roynal 9y ago
Well, the example is a very simplistic one for the purpose of this interview. The vision, if you could call it that, was to package other signals e.g. weather, geography, and demography into personalizing a message. Having come from a background of e-commerce I definitely know personalization has a positive impact on cart values, engagement, and conversions. Considering all of that our hope was that we would be that kind of a personalization software for mobile apps.
- devit 9y ago
  But how does that work in practice? Does their system determine those signals or are they fed to it as input? How can it possibly provide a generic solution to "personalizing a message" that works across all apps and is not just something trivial like the example in the interview? On the web the kinds of "personalization" I can think of are public account profiles, targeted advertisements, recommendation engines ("you may also like...", "products like this...", etc.), algorithmic newsfeeds and history-sensitive search. If their software does any of those, maybe they should just say what it does.

akanet 9y ago

To the interviewee: Having learned these lessons, why are you uh, making the "Product Hunt for Marketing Tools" next? Have you applied your learnings from the failure of Eloquis? This seems like an even harder segment to make money in.

roynal 9y ago
Yes the lessons learned here were translated. As of now the product hunt for marketing is a place for discovery and we realize that our new model will build a community and we have to build active monetization around value-based product around the same premise - yes product hunt for marketing won't make money by itself.